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Is the cumulative time spent screwing around reading reviews, comparing brands and choosing products more than the time spent replacing broken things? Just buying the cheapest thing that does what you are looking for saves a heck of a lot of time.

Everybody loves to go on about quality but quality doesn't always pan out in terms of time or money cost. There's plenty of cases where some thing you've bought will meet its end in a way unrelated to whether it's high or low quality. If you really want to optimize you have to tailor your purchasing to your specific use case.




I've tried all kinds of strategies.

A simple approach is to just pull the trigger quickly on whatever has a million 5 star reviews and looks acceptable and is cheap. This feels environmentally offensive. Throwing away something that 99% works with one broken part. I feel sick when I have to do this.

Another approach is to try to get something expensive but durable and fixable. Unfortunately we live in a crappy future where nobody has any pride anymore and nothing's built to last decades. I have a 30 year old jigsaw I got from my grandfather and I frickin' love it.




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